I recently gave my roommate a copy of Rosemary Radford Ruether's Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, which inspired me to go back and re-read it. Although it was written back in the early 90s, it remains pertinent for the major environmental challenges we face today. Furthermore, she closely links a quest for environmental sustainability with calls for peace and justice, exemplified in her dedication of the book to Adiba Khader and the other victims of an American "smart bomb" that destroyed a bomb shelter in Iraq during the Gulf War. For a general overview of Ruether's thought, see my introduction.
Ruether's book follows a method she frequently employs: she narrates the historical development of an ethical problem, highlighting religious ideologies both for their negative and positive contributions to the issue at hand. She opens Gaia and God with two parallel accounts, one detailing notions of creation from ancient Babylon to modern science, another dealing with scenarios of world destruction with the same sweep. The Bible, in this view, is not a unique foundation for religious reflection, but rather one stage of ongoing religious reflection, a perspective that distances Ruether's program from green evangelicalism.
Her first chapter deals with the classical creation myths of Western culture: The Babylonian Enuma Elish, its reworking in Genesis 1, and Plato's Timaeus: Plato's dialogue became the lens through which Genesis was read in classical Christian thought, a development she sees as exacerbating elements that contribute to Christianity's traditional hesitation to embrace environmental concerns. Not only does she fault the Platonic lens for exacerbating problematic tendencies in Genesis 1, she is rather more critical of the Genesis narratives themselves on account of both environmental and gender dynamics than a number of liberal commentators on Genesis.
In Western religious thought, the idea of God's omnipotence is often linked to a notion that God creates the world ex nihilo, literally from nothing. This view implies that the material world is worth less than than an ideal non-material realm in which deity has unrestrained power. However, Ruether notes that in none of these early creation stories does a deity create the world from nothing - matter coexists with divine power from the outset, a perspective developed more recently with breathtaking detail by Catherine Keller in Face of the Deep. Ruether notes that this understanding of matter as the pre-existing "stuff" of the cosmos was lost in the early Christian era, and this interpretive shift led to a general denigration of the material world in much Christian thought. She sees especially in the understanding of mortality in the classical Christian synthesis, in which humanity is held responsible for mortality through the Fall and yet is uniquely among life forms destined to escape mortality through the Resurrection, a root perspective that has contributed to ecological irresponsibility.
Her second chapter is a summary of modern scientific understandings of evolution and cosmogony. Overall, she affirms the basic findings of science the origin of the universe as a necessary starting point for reflection. However, she also notes that modern worldviews that have attempted to root out spirituality in the name of scientific materialism have been unsuccessful - writing as she did in the early 90s, her reference point for this claim is the Marxist states of the Cold War; one might speculate on how she would modify this perspective in light of newer studies on the healthy, but overwhelmingly irreligious, societies of Scandanavia, such as Phil Zuckerman's Society Without God. (She has laid out the precise difference between her religious feminism and secular feminism in her essay Bridging the Gap.) She concludes this chapter with a call for "scientist-poets who can retell .. the story of the cosmos and the earth's history, in a way that can call us to wonder, to reverence for life, and to the vision of humanity living in community with all its sister and brother human beings." In this respect, I suspect she would be more than happy to join forces with Richard Dawkins' project in Unweaving the Rainbow, even while she would distance herself from many of the claims of The God Delusion.
In her third chapter, Ruether returns to the historical perspective, this time looking at myths of world destruction from ancient Babylon to modern Fundamentalism. She diagnoses apocalypticism as a deformation of the prophetic impulse of Israelite religion. Where prophetic thought envisioned a just world on earth, apocalyptic desires express frustration with the inability to achieve a just world by projecting the desires onto an otherworldly scenario. One interesting aspect of her account is her inclusion of women, such as the English seventeenth-century prophet Mary Cary and the nineteenth-century Adventist Ellen White, as important figures in the development of apocalypticism. This move both highlights women as significant movers of historical change, but also shows how women can participate in problematic ideologies. Ruether's feminism is not based on a special pleading that women are more innocent than men, but on a demand that women have equal access to the ambiguities of responsibility. She develops ideas along these lines at length in a later chapter on feminist ideas of an original matriarchy.
The fourth chapter is a detailed account of the ecological crises of the present time. I presume that DailyKos readers are familiar with Global Warming and other ecological problems and won't go into detail on her explanation of the basic facts on the matter. The following section deals with three different accounts of human responsibility and systems of injustice, again moving through an historical account before laying out contemporary perspectives.
While the first sections of the book are largely critical accounts, laying out how Western religions and scientific worldviews have contributed to bringing us to the brink of environmental catastrophe, in the last section, she mines the Christian tradition for elements that can be retrieved in ethical reflection on the ecological crisis. Ruether is adamant that this retrieval can not occur without substantial modification: the ecological crisis, in which humans have the capacity to destroy the ecosystem of the entire earth, is unprecedented in human history. Religious traditions have never had to grapple with these exact questions before. (An earlier attempt to grapple with the radically new context for theology was Gordon Kaufman's Theology for a Nuclear Age.) She is equally insistent that Christian traditions are not the only religious resources to turn to. However, as a Christian writer, the Christian tradition is where her spiritual roots are and is the tradition for which she feels compelled to take responsibility. She highlights two large trajectories: the covenantal tradition and the sacramental tradition.
Covenant, a legal formula binding two parties - one of which can be divine, is one of the central root metaphors of biblical thought. Because of this centrality of the metaphor throughout the Bible, to turn to this tradition is not simply a matter of cherry-picking ideas out of the Bible, but of developing a theme that is crucial to every aspect of biblical thought. Ruether begins her discussion of the covenantal tradition with a discussion of trajectories of biblical thought in which God relates to nature directly. She notes that this aspect of biblical thought has been downplayed especially in nineteenth-century liberal Protestant interpretation of the Bible, which posited a stark dualism between Pagan nature religion and Israelite historical religion. She notes how this distinction is a later imposition on Israelite worldviews, which tended to view natural and historical phenomena in tandem as expressions of God's judgment or favor. I would quibble a bit with her on this point. Many of her examples illustrate this perspective beautifully - however, her extended discussion of the Book of Job brings it in line with a covenantal understanding, whereas the whole Book of Job is more of a critique of the basic presuppositions of covenant.
The centerpiece of her discussion of the covenantal tradition is the Jubilee laws found in Leviticus, generally the most reviled biblical book among liberal Christians. The Jubilee laws are a mandate for periods of rest and forgiveness of debt. This includes letting animals rest and fields lie uncultivated for a period, a practice that highlights that non-human life has its own demands apart from its usefulness for humanity. In contrast to apocalyptic perspectives, which imagine a single end-point where absolute justice will be achieved, the Jubilee traditions realize that society is embedded in the cycles of nature, and that just relations will need to be reestablished on a periodic basis. She goes on to show how Calvinist interpretations of covenant were crucial to the development of the idea of human rights, a view which has been spelled out more recently in John Witte's The Reformation of Rights. She then turns to contemporary ethical debates about to what extent, and in what way, rights should be extended to non-human life. Ruether stresses the continuity, rather than the break, between such contemporary ethical reflection in secular terms and its religious roots.
She then turns to a chapter discussing the sacramental tradition before a a chapter promoting concrete proposals for living ecologically. At the time of her writing, in the early 90s, she followed the World Conference on Environment and Development in expecting that the trends of modern society give us until about 2030 to make major changes in how we live before a series of disasters forces changes on us. She reports that a question she often receives in her talks on ecology is whether she is pessimistic or optimistic. She notes that these are false choices that both lead to inaction. Rather,
What we need is neither optimism nor pessimism ... but committed love. This means we remain committed to a vision and to concrete communities of life no matter what the "trends" may be. Whether we are immediately "winning" or "losing" cannot shake our rooted understandings of what biophilic life is and should be.
And echoing her turn from apocalyptic to Jubilee perspectives,
We also remain clear that life is not made whole "once and for all," in some static millennium of the future. It is made whole again and again, in the renewed day born from night and in the new spring that rises from each winter.